Universal Semantic Parsing
This work addresses the need for multilingual semantic parsing to advance applications like question answering, though it is incremental as it builds on existing syntactic representations.
The authors tackled the problem of semantic parsing being limited to English and unable to handle dependency graphs, by introducing UDepLambda, a semantic interface for Universal Dependencies that maps natural language to logical forms in a nearly language-independent way and processes dependency graphs, resulting in a 4.9 F1 point improvement over state-of-the-art on GraphQuestions for English.
Universal Dependencies (UD) offer a uniform cross-lingual syntactic representation, with the aim of advancing multilingual applications. Recent work shows that semantic parsing can be accomplished by transforming syntactic dependencies to logical forms. However, this work is limited to English, and cannot process dependency graphs, which allow handling complex phenomena such as control. In this work, we introduce UDepLambda, a semantic interface for UD, which maps natural language to logical forms in an almost language-independent fashion and can process dependency graphs. We perform experiments on question answering against Freebase and provide German and Spanish translations of the WebQuestions and GraphQuestions datasets to facilitate multilingual evaluation. Results show that UDepLambda outperforms strong baselines across languages and datasets. For English, it achieves a 4.9 F1 point improvement over the state-of-the-art on GraphQuestions. Our code and data can be downloaded at https://github.com/sivareddyg/udeplambda.